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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

We probably won’t find out what Google has put forward for several days, or possibly even weeks, but the proposal will lay out the terms under which the internet giant is prepared to settle with the EU’s anti-trust commission, which has been investigating it for alleged anti-competitive behavior.

According to AllThingsD, Google only just met last night’s 12am deadline (Brussels’s time) with barley minutes to spare.

Google was ordered to come up with the proposal last year as a way of avoiding facing charges under the EU’s strict competition laws. The firm has been accused of, amongst other things, scraping content from other company’s websites, being biased towards its own services in its search engine results, and shutting out competing advertising networks. By proposing to amend its ways, Google is hoping that it can avoid EU sanctions and with it, get out of admitting any wrongdoing.

Most likely, Google will propose a similar arrangement to the one that got the FTC off of its back, albeit with a few alterations.

The biggest difference will probably relate to how Google labels its own services in Europe, something that Mr. Almunia touched upon last month when he suggested that the company should ‘clearly label’ services like Google Shopping when these are artificially ranked higher than organic search results.

Even more interesting will be whether or not Google makes any concessions over its preferential treatment for its own services against those of rival companies – a practice that the company has always denied doing in the past. In the US, Google managed to squirm its way out of this one after the FTC’s commission ruled that there was “no evidence” that Google was doing this, but it might find it harder to do so this time around, as the EU does things quite differently. Unlike in the US, where the commissioners make the decisions alone, in Europe the third-party complainants (which number more than 20) also have a say in whether or not any settlement is acceptable. What’s more, they also have legal rights – meaning that if Almunia decided to go against their wishes and settle, he too could also end up in court alongside Google, if third parties decided to reject the settlement. Simply put, Google will have to address the accusation of bias somehow if it wants to avoid going to court.

It’s a tricky one for Google, as it really does seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, if it sticks to its guns it could well end up being sanctioned and fined millions of dollars. But unfortunately for them the alternative isn’t much better, for if it bends over backwards to settle with the EU, its businesses would likely lose just as much in revenues over the long term, simply because it would have to start competing on fair terms.

About Mike Wheatley

Mike Wheatley is a senior staff writer at SiliconANGLE. He loves to write about Big Data and the Internet of Things, and explore how these technologies are evolving and helping businesses to become more agile.
Before joining SiliconANGLE, Mike was an editor at Argophilia Travel News, an occassional contributer to The Epoch Times, and has also dabbled in SEO and social media marketing. He usually bases himself in Bangkok, Thailand, though he can often be found roaming through the jungles or chilling on a beach.
Got a news story or tip? Email Mike@SiliconANGLE.com.